Publications

Research waste is highly prevalent across biomedical investigations. We aimed to assess the evidence on the extent of research waste in dental research. We performed a scoping review of empirical evaluations of dental studies assessing the prevalence and impact of limitations in design, conduct, analysis, and reporting of research. PubMed was searched using specific terms to retrieve studies dealing with design, conduct, analysis, and reporting of studies in dentistry, with no year or language restrictions. Of the 1,807 publications identified from the search and from manual searches, 71 were included in this review. The topic and article selection was based on the expert opinion of the authors. The existing evidence suggests that, although there are improvements over time, substantial deficiencies in all areas (design, conduct, analysis, reporting) were prevalent in dental research publications. Waste in research is a multifaceted problem without a simple solution. However, an appreciation of optimal research design and execution is a prerequisite and should be underpinned by policies that include appropriate training in research methods and properly aligned incentives.

OBJECTIVE: Compare the risk of harm from pharmacologic interventions in pediatric versus adult randomized controlled trials (RCTs). METHODS: We used systematic reviews from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. We considered separately 7 categories of harms/harm-related end points: severe harms, withdrawals due to harms, any harm, organ system–level harms, specific harms, withdrawals for any reason, and mortality. Systematic reviews with quantitative synthesis from at least 1 adult and 1 pediatric RCT for any of those end points were eligible. We calculated the summary odds ratio (experimental versus control intervention) in adult and pediatric trials/meta-analysis; the relative odds ratio (ROR) in adults versus children per meta-analysis; and the summary ROR (sROR) across all meta-analyses for each end point. ROR <1 means that the experimental intervention fared worse in children than adults. RESULTS: We identified 176 meta-analyses for 52 types of harms/harm-related end points with 669 adult and 184 pediatric RCTs. Of those, 165 had sufficient data for ROR estimation. sRORs showed statistically significant discrepancy between adults and children only for headache (sROR 0.82; 95% confidence interval 0.70–0.96). Nominally significant discrepancies for specific harms were identified in 12 of 165 meta-analyses (RORs <1 in 7, ROR >1 in 5). In 36% of meta-analyses, the ROR estimates suggested twofold or greater differences between children and adults, and the 95% confidence intervals could exclude twofold differences only in 18% of meta-analyses. CONCLUSIONS: Available evidence on harms/harm-related end points from pharmacologic interventions has large uncertainty. Extrapolation of evidence from adults to children may be tenuous. Some clinically important discrepancies were identified.

The problem of cache coherence in shared-memory multiprocessors has been addressed using two basic approaches: directory schemes and snoopy cache schemes. Directory schemes have been given less attention in the past several years, while snoopy cache methods have become extremely popular. Directory schemes for cache coherence are potentially attractive in large multiprocessor systems that are beyond the scaling limits of the snoopy cache schemes. Slight modifications to directory schemes can make them competitive in performance with snoopy cache schemes for small multiprocessors. Trace driven simulation, using data collected from several real multiprocessor applications, is used to compare the performance of standard directory schemes, modifications to these schemes, and snoopy cache protocols .

The current Internet infrastructure has very few built-in protection mechanisms and is therefore vulnerable to attacks and failures. In particular, recent events have illustrated the Internet's vulnerability to both denial of service (DoS) attacks and flash crowds in which one or more links in the network (or servers at the edge of the network) become severely congested. In both flash crowds and DoS attacks the congestion is not due to a single flow, nor to a general increase in traffic, but to a well-defined subset of the traffic -- an aggregate. This paper discusses mechanisms for detecting and controlling such high bandwidth aggregates. Our approach involves both a local mechanism for detecting and controlling an aggregate at a single router, and a cooperative pushback mechanism in which a router can ask adjacent routers to control an aggregate upstream. These mechanisms, while certainly not a panacea, provide relief from flash crowds and flooding-style DoS attacks.

We explore the application of dense camera arrays to view interpolation across space and time for dynamic scenes. Large video camera arrays are typically synchronized, but we show that staggering camera triggers provides a much richer set of samples on which to base the interpolation. We do not increase the total number of samplesowe merely distribute them more effectively in time. We use optical o w to interpolate new views. Within this framework, we nd that the dense space-time sampling provided by staggered timing improves the robustness of the interpolation. We present an novel optical o w method that combines a plane plus parallax framework with knowledge of camera spatial and temporal offsets to generate o w elds for virtual images at new space-time locations. We present results interpolating video from a 96-camera light eld using this method.

ABSTRACT The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 among non-elderly people in the absence of vaccination or prior infection is important to estimate accurately, since 94% of the global population is younger than 70 years and 86% is younger than 60 years. In systematic searches in SeroTracker and PubMed (protocol: https://osf.io/xvupr ), we identified 40 eligible national seroprevalence studies covering 38 countries with pre-vaccination seroprevalence data. For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.035% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013 - 0.056%) for the 0-59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036 - 0.125%,) for the 0-69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025-0.032% for 0-59 years and 0.063-0.082% for 0-69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups. The current analysis suggests a much lower pre-vaccination IFR in non-elderly populations than previously suggested. Large differences did exist between countries and may reflect differences in comorbidities and other factors. These estimates provide a baseline from which to fathom further IFR declines with the widespread use of vaccination, prior infections, and evolution of new variants. Highlights *Across 31 systematically identified national seroprevalence studies in the pre-vaccination era, the median infection fatality rate of COVID-19 was estimated to be 0.035% for people aged 0-59 years people and 0.095% for those aged 0-69 years. *The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years. *At a global level, pre-vaccination IFR may have been as low as 0.03% and 0.07% for 0-59 and 0-69 year old people, respectively. *These IFR estimates in non-elderly populations are lower than previous calculations had suggested.

Athletic endurance performance is probably partly under genetic control, but genetic association studies have yielded inconclusive results. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the association of polymorphisms in eight muscle- or metabolism-related genes with endurance performance in participants of the Olympus Marathon running race. We recruited 438 athletes who participated in the 2007 and 2008 annual running events of the Olympus Marathon: a 43.8-km race with an ascent from sea level to 2,690-m altitude and then a descent to 300 m. Phenotypes of interest were the competitive event time at the specific Olympus Marathon where the athlete was enrolled, the fastest reported timing ever achieved in an Olympus Marathon, and how many kilometers per week the athlete ran during the previous year. Eleven polymorphisms in α 3 -actinin ( ACTN3), AMP deaminase-1 ( AMPD1), bradykinin B 2 receptor ( BDKRB2), β 2 -adrenergic receptor ( ADRB2), peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)-γ coactivator-1α ( PPARGC1A), PPAR-α ( PPARA), PPAR-δ ( PPARD), and apoliprotein E ( APOE) were evaluated. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium testing on the overall cohort of male athletes showed a significant deviation for BDKRB2 rs1799722 ( P = 0.018; P = 0.006 when limited to 316 habitual male runners) with an excess of the TT genotype. Across all athletes, no associations showed nominal statistical significance for any of the three phenotypes, and the same was true when analyses were limited to men ( n = 417). When limited to 316 male athletes who identified running as their preferred sport, ADRB2 rs1042713 had nominally significant associations with faster times for the minor (A) allele for the fastest time ever ( P = 0.01). The direction of effect was identical as previously postulated only for BDKRB2 rs1799722 and ADRB2 rs1042713, indicating consistency. BDKRB2 rs1799722 and ADRB2 rs1042713 have some support for being implicated in endurance performance among habitual runners and require further investigation.